Words Is a Powerful Thing
Subtitle: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2021
Language: eng
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780700632176
Description: "Since 2001, poet and professor Brian Daldorph has taught a creative writing class at the Douglas County Jail in Lawrence, Kansas. During this time he has worked with thousands of inmates, helping them to find the words to express their struggles while also giving him a unique insight into the behemoth that is the American justice system. Daldorph has taught the class every Thursday now for nearly two decades, and over the years he has watched these talented persons channel their pain into poetry and so make the experience of incarceration just a bit more tolerable. A few of them, like Shane Crady and Antonio Sanchez-Day, leave the classroom knowing it might mean even more than that, as some of them have become published writers as a result of the work they did in Daldorph's class. Words Is a Powerful Thing is a work of bricolage-memoir, creative writing chapbook, literary analysis, journalism, pedagogical handbook, and more. The work invites readers to sit in the classroom, hear the students' poetry, and see these lives that too often remain invisible to society. By giving his students the opportunity to tell their stories, Daldorph demonstrates not only that writing and artistic expression can change lives, but also how much one can achieve in limited time in a small classroom at a county jail in Lawrence, Kansas"--